This is an actual early logo panel shared with the core team. We boxed the ones we initially liked but as we talked, that changed. Always leave room to change your mind. Spot the one that eventually paved the way for the actual logo.
In 2015, one of the early founding members (Elroy Pinto) of Level99 reached out to Johan Sundstein (n0tail). He’d left Cloud9 earlier that year and had decided he was going to build his own team and org. It started as Monkey Business. We all knew each other through our time at Fnatic. Both Elroy and myself always felt there was something special about Johan. It was the way he treated those who met him; showing empathy that very few pro-players did. We saw him dig so deep into understanding the game he played… but who he played it with would always take centre stage. In late 2015, we got on a Skype call and talked about creating an org that would go on to become OG DOTA2.
When we were starting 99 in late 2015, none of us had experience building brands or logos. I knew we had some incredibly talented artists by our side (Mateja and Eddy) and an eagerness to figure things out. That was a start.
Whenever faced with a challenging task, start by accepting that someone, somewhere, before you, most likely faced similar challenges and decided to write or speak about it. There’s value in figuring things out for yourself but always seek out resources that will teach you about those experiences. Then figure things out the best way you know how. Take all input but never allow anyone to make you think they know what’s best. If they knew, they’d do.
This won’t be a history class on creating an esports org (perhaps another write-up down the line). I’m going to focus in on the branding part. Once I knew we were going to be creating a new brand, I started by putting together a checklist of top-level tasks that I’d need to work through to get us there.
Here’s a summarised checklist I put together from the priorities we listed back in 2015. It’s evolved in detail today but the overall list is all you need to take into account when creating a brand:
- (RESEARCH ) Talk openly to the people who will rep the brand and find out what others before had done to understand the potential pitfalls
- (PROJECT MANAGEMENT) Create a place where we could share progress, be accountable to deadlines and collaborate with one another openly
- (IDENTITY) Decide on the general feel of what we were going for
- (NAMING) Figure out what the brand was going to be called
- (LOGO DESIGN) Design a logo
- (COLOR PALETTE) Agree on the core and any associated colors
- (BRAND TOUCH-POINTS) Understand how that brand would be presented across social media and by the members of the brand
- (BRAND GUIDELINES) Guide ourselves and others how to use the brand when it would appear in digital or print
- (PR) Create a plan for how to share the brand and encourage conversation
RESEARCH
If you’re looking to create a brand from scratch and don’t have experience finding a process that works for those you’re serving, this part is where you’ll be spending a lot of your time initially. This can be broadly broken down into two parts:
A) Talking, reading and watching experienced branding specialists (Eat)
B) Speak to those who will own and represent the brand (Listen)
Eat
Consume specialist knowledge. Over the last few years, I’ve collected a list of the best resources that helped me better understand the branding process and become more familiar with branding terminology.
Here are 5 essential books I can’t recommend enough:
The 22 Immutable laws of branding by Al and Laura Ries
How to Style your brand by Fiona Humberstone
Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller
Designing Brand Identity by Alina Wheeler
The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier
Here are 3 jam-packed-with-value YouTube Channels to check out:
The Futur lead by Chris Do
Pixels Ink by Col Gray
Will Paterson
Once I felt I had a better feel for the branding process, I turned to LinkedIn. I first looked at some of the brands that I admired, googled to find out who the Art Director or Head Designer was on that project and just sent them a message through Linkedin. I explained what we were working on, spoke openly and directly of the respect I had for their work and asked them for tips . I’ll share a list of these with those who get my end of week email newsletter. Otherwise, this post will never end.
Listen
This bit is the most crucial to the entire process. Everything ultimately boils down to how well you can question and listen to the people who will embody the brand. The most valuable thing I’ve learned this last 5 years of working on branding projects (OG, G2, H2K, ESM, Ubisoft and others) is that understanding the person/people behind the brand will always determine the direction you ultimately take.
For OG DOTA2, we started by speaking to the early core of the team. We worked to understand who they were, what they stood for and how they saw OG. Roughly 20+ hours of group calls later, we created an internal summary at 99 that would become our north star throughout the entire branding process. This is taken from the original google sheet:
The goal of the listening exercise is to create some form of summary that can guide you. Internally, it allowed us to determine the quality of our ideas.
To create a frame of reference for what we would create, we put together a short-list of popular people that we called ‘brand icons’. These were people that we felt would serve as spiritual inspiration for what we would end up creating. Now seeing that list of names from 2015 makes me look at OG Esports today and realise that most of these still hold true (with the exception of Maradona). These were people who stood up for themselves, weren’t afraid to be outspoken and were considered off-brand in comparison to their peers at the time. Here’s a shot of that original list from the first powerpoint deck we made:
Looking back, it was all terribly written. That actually really doesn’t matter. It made sense to the OG core and us. We agreed and moved forward to the next step: how to keep all of our summarised conversations in one place and track progress for creating the brand.
In the next part, I’ll break down the tools we used to do this, how we used them, present the real structure we used and then share how that process evolved to where it is today.